DEARBORN, TEXAS. Dearborn was on the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway ten miles southeast of Votaw and thirty miles northwest of Beaumont in northwestern Hardin County. John A. McShane, president of McShane Lumber Company and partner in the Creighton-McShane Oil Company, had by the mid-1890s acquired considerable land in Hardin County. By 1905 McShane Lumber Company, with headquarters at Omaha, Nebraska, had begun logging in the area. Although the company owned or had timber rights to various tracts north of Saratoga and southwest of Hardin, operations centered around its sawmill and acreage at Dearborn. Tram lines extended from the company's rail station to logging camps in the surrounding forests. On August 25, 1913, a fire destroyed the company's planing-mill boilerhouse at Dearborn. The community's population subsequently declined, as the lumbering operations at Dearborn slowed and the company began to dispose of its Hardin County properties. The Dearborn post office had opened in 1904 and was discontinued in 1915. The Dearborn voting precinct was abolished the following year.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. T. Block, ed., Emerald of the Neches: The Chronicles of Beaumont from Reconstruction to Spindletop (Nederland, Texas: Nederland Publishing, 1980).
